Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography.(Book Review)

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-JUL-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Modern Humanities Research Association

Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography. Ed. by PETER FRANCE and WILLIAM ST CLAIR. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press for the British Academy. 2002. x+350 pp. 35 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-19-726269-4.

This book might have been more accurately entitled 'Mapping Literary Lives'. Nevertheless, it is one of the best contributions to the life-writing critical industry of the last decade, and has much to say about biography generally. Compilations of essays too frequently produce an intellectually incoherent project. Here the editors have done a brilliant job of shaping their text. Historical/descriptive scholarship lays the ground of the form in Europe from the ancient Greeks to the eighteenth century, when the term 'biography' took on its modern usage. The biographical traditions of...

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